Umbrella (43 page)

streaked by dried tears and
going away from her
. . .
Busner requires of Audrey Death what any physician does of his star patient – that she should damn her former one by
telling him calmly and coherently how excellently she’s doing on her daily two grammes of eldoughpa, still, there’s plenty of time for that as well
. . .
–
So – Marcus pushes his pitted nose between their seatbacks – where’re we headed on this daytrip, the British Museum perhaps? Busner is flummoxed: I’m sorry? And Marcus brays, exposing big and ivoried tusks –
He is the walrus
– then comes out with
the wheeze
he’s probably been rehearsing since he left St John’s Wood:
Busner, if you’ve disinterred some mummies, surely the proper thing to do is take ’em to see some of their own kind. Audrey murmurs, Howard Carter . . . Marcus is shocked by his own crassness at having spoken as if she weren’t there, Busner by this time bomb. – What did you say, Miss Death? He speaks loudly – Dunphy is riding the clutch, revving the minibus out from between the gatehouses and on to Friern Barnet Road. – I said Howard Carter, he was the fellow who dug up the supposedly accursed tomb – I remember that. All the orderlies were talking about it. Biggest flap since the Brides in the Bath, sold a packet of penny papers they did when he died – sheer superstition, of course . . . pouce à l’oreille . . . I wonder what happened to . . .
who’s she speaking to?
that nincompoop Feydeau – long dead, I s’pose . . . long gone . . . Ignoring the consternation she’s provoked, Audrey relapses into her seat and silence as the minibus prowls past the awnings of the Rosemount Guest House. Or Kew Gardens, Marcus bumbles on, Kew Gardens are always awfully jolly. Busner corrects him: No, Kew’d be too far for their first trip out, I’ve settled on somewhere local – the Alexandra Palace. Marcus bleats, Ally-Pally! What the hell is there to do or see there? Place is pretty much derelict nowadays, surely. Busner gets out his notebook and, selecting the red Biro from the row in his breast pocket, awkwardly jots down the insight which, although taking form in him for some time, only crystallizes now, in the telling of it. – Not do – see, it’s what they’ve been looking at for years – decades now. It’s – it’s the horizon of their world – the outer limit. By going there and looking back at Friern, we’ll be breaking the spell for them – setting them free. It’s these words he’s scrawled:
setting them free
, underlined twice, wonkily. Marcus receives them in silence, only the
chopped-liverish air
he emits from his tightened lips suggests that lodged inside him is a
balloon full of bilious cynicism
. When he does at length speak, his tone is confidential: You do understand, the functional integrity of the cerebral cortex is an absolute – mark me – absolute prerequisite for anything resembling homeostasis . . . Busner knows
what he’s driving at . . . that none of this can last . . . because in my heart of hearts I know: there are no such things as miracle drugs
. It’s a conclusion that Busner had arrived at three years before, when, peering horrified into the scrap of mirror above the sink in the poky downstairs lavatory of the Willesden Concept House, he had seen his nose detach from above his lip and commence a halting – but for all that, undeniably real – circuit of his face. Besides, Marcus
bangs on
, how much is this stuff costing? And when Busner admits that it’s in the region of four hundred pounds per pound, he laughs long before forcing out, Well, that’s hardly going to help the balance-of-bloody-payments!
And yet . . . And yet
. . .
as Dunphy grinds the gears and the minibus hops-skips-jumps across the North Circular, Busner finds
I’m not put out at all
, because: Look, he says to Marcus, look at them – look at the joy they’re taking in each other. The old alienist turns to observe the three elderly men: Voss, Ostereich, McNeil, who for so many years have been bounded not simply by the man-made but the mad-made – chairs upholstered by maniacs, broom handles wonkily turned by hebephrenics – and whose first few minutes on board the bus were spent rearing away from the undulating asphalt tongue they feared would lash through the windscreen and slurp them from their seats, but who are now relaxing at the sight of summer gardens. The puce droop of a laden rosebush, the lofty and fierily crowned sunflowers, the blazing crenulations of potted germaniums – these, the jolly bastions of Englishness, they remember well enough. They’re lulled by the miniaturised farmland of allotments and sheds, then aroused by plants and flowers that are strange to them – the kinky shock of some pampas grass excites them, then a buddleia thrusting from the pier of a railway bridge
really gets them going
, and so they begin to
natter away.
— My old dad kept a whelk stall on Dover front, says McNeil, but he hated the things with a passion! Lumps of fishy rubber, he used to say, give me an ’andful of fresh spring onions any day, Alf – ’eads down in the earth, feet up in the fresh air, way your mother ought t’be! A clap of laughter is followed by Ostereich’s confession that, You know, when I was a boy in Vienna we lived in an apartment – but my uncle, he had a Schrebergarten – an allotment you would say – and he grew the most marvellous currants, I do so love the currants! Oh, he continues, why is it that I feel so bloody marvellous today! Whereupon Voss chimes in: I know just what you mean – the last time I felt this way was in a dentist’s parlour when he’d given me the funny stuff –! You were lucky, McNeil breaks in, we only ever? ’ad sixpence for the puller – so no gas! Once again the three old men laugh and Marcus says to Busner, You don’t think there’s a certain morbidity in such, ah, ebullience? Tightening the arm he’s thrown around the back of Audrey’s seat, Busner says, Can’t you manage to go with the flow just a little, Doctor Marcus? Don’t you get it: they’re on holiday – the holiday of a lifetime? — Which is what, he ruminates miserably, Miriam wants – not an ordinary seaside jaunt to some Cornish cove where the boys can make sandcastles and the baby eat them. Nor will a potter along Brittany lanes in the Austin do – they are to jet away from Heathrow in a fortnight’s time. I’ll make all the arrangements, she had said, pulling the rim of the Lazy Susan so that the sweet-and-sour pork balls were drawn towards her
hardly kosher
. Moodily he had listened to the muted sproing and yawp of the Chinese background music, murkily he considered the flakes of fish food that flip-flopped down into the tank from the same hand with which the waiter had just laid out their plates – although why this should matter he did not know. The boys in their green-and-gold barred ties and grey Aertex shirts had sat subdued by this: the strangeness of this meal out, en famille, the sole point of which was to arrange still more strangeness: a family holiday that, should he decide not to accompany them, would be the start of
a permanent vacation –
from me
. Zack had read somewhere that white was the Chinese colour for mourning, why then were the tablecloths in the Jade Garden not pink, or purple – or black, yes, black would, he had thought, be best, for with his acquiescence to this perfectly reasonable request –
I am dying
. . .
Yes, of course, he had said – and: The Alhambra, that’ll be sensational, I’ve always wanted to go. Honest? Miriam said. Honest, her duplicitous husband replied, taking her hand and rubbing his thumb over the fretwork of bone and tendon and artery . . .
I have died
. And he was buried in a grave
the same shape as I am
, right down to the extra half-whorl on his ears, the slight webbing between the third and fourth toes of his right foot, and the protuberance of his navel, which was all that remained of the linkage to the mother
I cannot remember
, – despite being certain that her eyes – wary, as those of the dead must be – were staring out at him through Miriam’s, the lids of which she had anointed for this special occasion with white mascara, making her look suitably close to extinction –
like Chi Chi
. Sitting there, putrefying, Zack had realised that the earth so densely packed around his body must be of a special sort, or how else could it fit him so well? Much of it was the translucent atmosphere of the Jade Garden, some was his own cotton, flannel and wool – but there was still more of this magic clay modelled into his wife’s living hand, and this pulsed, squeezing
my cold dead one
, while Miriam’s voice resounded still:
Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year
. . .
He turns to Audrey Death and says, This year, this . . . usually . . . He hunkers round to face Mboya, who sits
Byzantine at the back of the bus, the sun filigreeing his almost-Afro. –
Enoch – she, you . . . What did you call the little structure Miss Death made under her bed? Mboya shakes puppyish
to attention. Her shrine, he calls back, we called it her shrine . . . Hephzibah Inglis frowns
sensing blasphemy?
and Busner says, Yes, your shrine, Miss Death – every year, for as long as Mister Mboya has been caring for you, you’ve made an odd little shrine or grotto under your bed, can you remember this at all? Audrey smiles, her twiggy fingers go to her temples and scratch at the dried-out nest of white hair. Audrey’s grisly habit is a sore trial to Busner, these pathetic cast-offs of human vermin sent for fumigation – he wishes her clad in . . . What? A twin set – or a long tweed skirt, a blouse with a lacy collar clasped by a cameo? Anything – but not this brown velour bag of a dress, far too large for her, and over it a robin-red, zip-up cardigan that’s far too small. The nurses have found her caramel-coloured slip-on shoes of exceptional ugliness, and the darned heel of a thick wool sock bulges carbuncular on her emaciated calf . . . Yet a sneer fissures her top lip and slashes her battered cheek,
and this, I love her for, because it’s proof that she remains above it all
. She says, We called them grottoes, Doctor Busner – lots of children made ’em when I was a girl in Fulham. No one, as I recall, ever hazarded an explanation – it was just something we did, a folk custom . . . maybe t’do with the seasons, ’cause we’d dress ’em with spring flowers – dandelions, buttercups, pansies maybe, lifted from gardens a street or two away . . . She laughs, a dry rasp. – Respectable types hated grottoing for that reason, but they’d still give us coppers – out’ve superstition, I s’pose . . . The minibus has silenced her, its engine whining hysterically as they lurch up Muswell Hill Broadway in a queue of traffic. Her puritanical gaze falls on a gaggle of schoolboys with collar- and even shoulder-length hair outside a sweetshop . . .
And when did you last see your father?
And then rises over the parade to where tiled roofs
pagoda
up to the apex of the hill – she cannot believe this: that the skin prison within which she has been sewn for all these years
or so they say
. . .
has turned out to be so flimsy. In the depths of her sopor she had dreamed this: the hospital growing out of her mortal shell, its whitewashed and bare walls
stretching . . . creasing . . . folding into nacre
. Always she remained
on the inside . . . trapped
, the heavy girders arched within her bent back, their rivets
my vertebrae
. . .
Cut through the dimpled plasterwork of her skull, dirty skylights illuminated . . .
nothing
. The floors – woodblock, asphalt, flagged – rose and fell as she walked,
so cemented were they to my feet
, and, as she shambled the long galleries, staggered the longer corridors, wheeled about the airing courts again and again, howled in the improved padded rooms, then flung her own bony cage against the locked fireguards, so she spat in the faces of these phthistical fellows – her mutinous other selves, hundreds upon thousands of them, their rough ticken overalls of a piece with the hospital’s fabric,
their unravelling forestalled – for now – by its
vicious selvedge